Legal News

On Justice Sonia Sotomayor: ?Not Swinging for the Rafters?

By Ashby Jones

So what was the big legal story of 2009? As our now former boss Jennifer Forsyth wrote last week, there were many candidates: the fallouts from the unmasking of both Bernie Madoff and Marc Dreier, the Ted Stevens acquittal, the Scott Rothstein flameout.

But for our money, the year largely belonged to David Souter’s retirement, and the process of finding and confirming his replacement, Sonia Sotomayor. For that reason, we were delighted to open our digital copies of the New Yorker this week to find a lengthy and wide-ranging article about Sotomayor. The timing, in our minds, couldn’t have been better.

The article, by reporter Lauren Collins, is worth reading for a host of reasons. But for our money, the piece is a standout largely due to the nuance with which it treats its subject. She’s eminently personable, but has already raised eyebrows with her aggressive questioning from the bench. She’s a stickler for preparation, but isn’t averse to letting down her hair as well. She’s a liberal given to quoting the likes of Carol Gilligan, but still rules for the prosecution the vast majority of the time.

One of Collins’s main points is one that takes a bit of nuanced insight to develop: that Sotomayor believes in institutions.

Writes Collins:

Sotomayor believes in the perfectibility of systems. Several of her former clerks attributed her impatience with unprepared lawyers to her reverence for the judicial process and her faith that, if it is administered meticulously, it will achieve the correct result. Clarence Thomas's experiences in the seventies caused him to embrace individualism; Sotomayor's made her an establishmentarian. She has a bit of a bureaucratic streak. When Princeton's administrators asked her to join the advisory committee to select the minority dean, she agreed to, but only as a formal delegate of Acción Puertorriqueña, a campus organization. Unlike Thomas, Sotomayor has wanted to be representative of a group.

But those looking for insight on a judicial philosophy might look to this paragraph:

Words, for Sotomayor, are means, not ends. She rarely attempts to transcend the facts at hand, or to speak to broader constituencies. "She's not swinging for the rafters," a former clerk said. "She writes for people who want to know what the law is." Sotomayor does not have a particularly novel, or consistent, judicial philosophy. An admirer of Justice Souter's writing, for its humility and restraint, "she believes that this is a serious business we're doing, and a judge shouldn't be taking the time to write a novel," [a former clerk Kyle] Wong said. Legal opinions, in Sotomayor's view, are like instruction manuals-every-one should be able to follow them.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 04, 2010 (boomark / email).